Greenfield development

The white farmer takes a piece of flat earth to market.

She is no flat earther.

But the land’s overcropped, and she’s sotto voce with the throb

of four generations’ profit and loss. Skin cancers profit her brow,

hands, arms and legs; four sons field the catch in her voice,

fence her in so she sells quickly. Her nib bleeds out over the contract,

fine cursive streams going nowhere. Hawkish, a pair of cufflinks

and a pair of wide agate eyes, watch. Fast settlements confuse

attachment, history. Wadawurrung. Wadawurrung.

When did her boys begin to look like undertakers? She reaches

for her comb, hands it to her middle-aged youngest, his Adam’s apple

a jitterbug combine. He wants the deal more than any of them,

is neat enough (most days) to shake hands with a city future.

Outside, the horizon squints, elongates in the heat.

The blistered ute bonnet, parked beside the agent’s new car,

rebukes; yet her father’s cataract stare once frightened bailiffs.

After the signing, the phone’s off for days. When she sees

her best fields carved up, pink allotment flags blowing in the wind,

she thinks it’s some new kind of sow stall.

Then lifestyle’s cropless verbs appear as billboard signs.

O bury me under the latte lake, she thinks, looking out

her kitchen window, from a past of minute hands,

good black earth and sponges sunk in the middle.

Next day, billboards truck to the lee of the sales office,

marooned in dirt.

Old ewes with pinprick eyes nudge carpeted heads in puzzlement,

gather by strange rectangles of shade. New-poured slabs,

white as snow, cramp thin soil, portals to nowhere.

She holds her mug tight, holds and breaks,

all the lambing woolly beauty of memory.

A. Frances Johnson